The 5 W’s of effective websites

On a recent vacation, one particular experience taught me a valuable lesson about websites: Understand the five W’s and your website will be more effective.

Analyzing the five W’s — who, why, what, where and when — can help you improve your website’s efficacy.

My example focuses on a B2C website, but the principle applies to all types of sites. I will add that the company name and URL will be withheld to protect the (not so) innocent.

Who

Who is your primary website user?

While traveling, my wife visited the website of a restaurant to determine if it would be a place we’d like to try. It was supposedly a tourist-oriented, family restaurant that we thought would be a fit for us, because we have young children. Upon visiting the restaurant’s website, my wife found it featured a banner advertisement for the venue’s “sister” property, which was a bar and grill clearly oriented to a young, single male crowd.

They were cross-selling via a risqué ad to the wrong “who,” and that message ultimately lost them our business.

Why

Why do users visit your website?

During our vacation we were primarily information gatherers. We visited websites for validation and credibility first, for contact information second. The restaurant website clearly did not support our expectations, and it also contained no contact information on the homepage had we wanted to make a quick inquiry.

What

A smart company uses the “who” and “why” to inform the “what.”

If you know who is coming to your site and you know why they’re there, you can extrapolate what they need in order for their visit to be positive experience. The restaurant website didn’t understand what we needed. We needed menus, location, and a phone number. Instead we were provided with information related to another venue and lengthy text about the restaurant’s history.

Robert Faletti is co-founder and principal of Blue Archer, a web design and digital marketing agency headquartered in Pittsburgh. Having a career spanning big consulting, corporate marketing and startups, he has worked in or with hundreds of companies from small and mid-sized businesses through global leaders such as Alcoa and Heinz.